From the Editor: ALCTS Activities Throughout the Year

Often it seems as though professional activities focus solely on conference time, with little going on in between. It's true that conferences generate a lot of activity, mainly because it's an opportunity for us all to meet face-to-face to present our latest breakthroughs and learn from one another. There are also other conferences outside of ALA Annual Conference and Midwinter Meeting where ALCTS members are involved. For example, several of our members participate in the IFLA General Conference and Assembly; their reports from the August 2013 conference in Singapore are available in the Conferences menu.

Alice Pearman

With that said, there's a lot of activity going on within ALCTS in between conferences. There are online courses, webinars, and e-forums featured throughout the year. The most recent e-forum about collection assessment and evaluation clearly touched an untapped audience when more than 100 librarians spoke up and said they'd like to be on a discussion list for this topic. View the ALA Connect post to find out how to sign up for the new Collection Assessment discussion list. A summary of the eforum is also available in the Features menu. There's also a Collection Management Section blog, the Collection=Connection, which deserves a look for anyone interested in that area of library service.

There's a lot more activity going on througout the year; many projects take months, even years, to complete. The Preservation Administrators Interest Group (PAIG) recently released their pilot Preservation Statistics Survey, a project that picked up where the now-defunct ARL Preservation Statistics Survey left off; there's more about their project in the Announcements menu. Other committees, such as the section and division publications committees, are always at work developing new publications that will benefit the profession, such as the recently released title, The Institutional Repository: Benefits and Challenges, edited by Pamela Bluh and Cindy Hepfer; Managing Microforms in the Digital Age, by Kitti Canepi, Becky Ryder, Michelle Sitko, and Catherine Weng; and the latest in the Sudden Selector's Guide series, Sudden Selector's Guide to Physics Resources by Michael Fosmire.

Yes, there's plenty to keep us busy in ALCTS. Keep an eye on the ALCTS News for more news and events from our members, from any day in the year.